ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

Why Digital Communication?

We know, that the electronic communication can either be analog or digital.  Today’s world is going digital, so it is really important to understand, the advantages of digital communication, that are responsible for the digitalization everywhere.

So here in this post, we will see, why digital communication is preferred over analog communication? But there are also some disadvantages associated with the digital communication. These disadvantages will also be discussed here. So first let's start with the advantages of digital communication.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Communication Video [HD]

 

Advantages of Digital Communication

1. Digital communication systems are simpler and cheaper in implementation as compared to analog communication systems. It has become possible due to advancements in Integrated Circuits (IC) technology. These ICs are very small in size, reliable and cost-effective. Such ICs are used in digital communication,

2. In digital communication, it is possible to use multiplexing to merge speech, video and other forms of data for transmission over a common channel. The multiplexing is of various types like Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) or Code Division Multiplexing (CDM).                     

I don’t want to deviate from the current topic, so I will discuss the multiplexing in separate post. 

       

3. High level of privacy can be obtained in digital communication using data encryption technique. This privacy provides the facility to allow the transmitted signals, to be received only by the permitted receivers. This feature is of great importance in military applications.

4. In digital communication channel encoding is used. Because of this encoding, there is less accumulation of noise from repeater to repeater, in case of long-distance communication. Apart from this, the digital signals tend to be less affected by noise as compared to analog signals.

5.  It is possible to perform lots of operations on digital signals, like Digital Signal Processing (DSP), data compression, image processing etc.

                      

6. It is easy to detect and correct errors in digital communication. This easy detection and correction of errors is possible due to the use of channel coding in digital communication.

So these were the advantages of using digital communication. These benefits encourage the use of digital communication in place of analog communication.

Now we will discuss some disadvantages that are associated with the digital communication.

Disadvantages of Digital Communication

                 

1. More transmission bandwidth is required in digital communication as compared to analog communication. This is due to the increase in the data rate when analog signal is converted into digital signal.

 

2. In digital communication, in case of synchronous modulation, synchronization is required.

                 

3. Due to various stages used in conversion, high power consumption is another drawback of digital communication.

4. Sampling error is introduced in the sampling of signal.                        

5. Circuits that are used in digital communication are comparatively more complex and sophisticated.

         

So this was the discussion about both advantages and disadvantages of digital communication but it’s worth mentioning that the advantages of using digital communication are more in comparison to disadvantages. Therefore digital communication is replacing analog communication nowadays.

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Advantages and disadvantages of digital communication system
Need and benefits of modulation
Sampling theorem and reconstruction (sampling and quantization)
Digital modulation techniques (coherent and non-coherent digital modulation techniques)
Digital modulation techniques (ASK, FSK, PSK, BPSK)/amplitude, frequency and phase shift keying)
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Pulse code modulation (PCM) vs differential pulse code modulation (DPCM)